Checking things off my List of Shame
So I went to graduate school. That’s where this all begins.
At NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, there are two separate film departments: one is called Film and Television, which is where you learn to actually make movies. This is the NYU film school you’ve heard of, whose alumni regularly win Emmys and Oscars and include people like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee.
The other department is called Cinema Studies, and it’s where you study the history and theory of film, not actual hands-on filmmaking. It’s where you watch interminable art films where nothing happens for four hours, and where (in my experience, at least) you don’t study anything more recent than about 1994.
Tisch had the quiet pretension of academia mixed with the pinpoint obsession of true cinephiles. Regularly during lectures a professor would forget the year a film was released, or what actor played a certain role, and would only have to wave a hand towards the students for several people to readily shout out the answer. I called it ‘IMDB live.’
There was a wonderfully clubby feeling to it but I always felt a nagging dread while I studied there because, like most people, there are a lot of famous movies I haven’t seen. Hell, I didn’t see THE WIZARD OF OZ until I was in college! And when you go to a school like NYU, they give you an actual list of films they expect you to be familiar with. Here it is.
Once I started talking about it with my cohorts, however, I discovered we all had things we never got around to watching. I dubbed this phenomenon the List of Shame. It became a running joke—she’s still never seen TAXI DRIVER! Are you serious, you’ve never seen PSYCHO? How have you never watched FRANKENSTEIN?!
I still carry a List of Shame around in my head (perhaps you do, too), and my fiancé and I have started checking things off it recently. Here’s my first report—an excellent film that proved uncannily timely.
NETWORK (1976), dir. Sydney Lumet
Available to stream on iTunes, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play
You know this movie’s most famous line, even if you don’t realize it: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” No, it’s not a discarded slogan for Fox News; it comes from Peter Finch’s character, a news anchor being laid off because of his sagging ratings. Unable to contain his frustration, he goes on air and announces he’s going to kill himself on live TV. His bosses are horrified and prepare to oust him immediately…until they see the ratings.
Instead of being fired, Finch’s character is quickly given his own show where audiences eagerly chant his most famous quip back to him. He doesn’t even pretend to deliver information on this show, just airs his grievances and works the audience into a frenzy, eventually earning him the title ‘mad prophet of the airwaves.’ As the network does everything it can to keep ratings up—recruiting terrorists for another primetime slot, moving the evening news under the entertainment department—Finch’s ratings continue to rise, until his ‘angry man hour’ is the highest-rated show on television.
Feels a little close to home these days, doesn’t it?
The picture NETWORK paints of TV and its effect on the American public isn’t just bleak, it’s nihilistic. There’s no pretense of public good or seeking the truth, only a craven rush to appeal to the lowest common denominator. But somehow the characters’ naked cynicism is refreshing to watch, 45 years later, because they’re not obfuscating what they’re doing. Nobody is under any illusions about giving Finch’s character his own show—they know what he’s going to do, and they don’t try to pass the ‘angry man hour’ off as anything else. At least the decisions about what constituted news in 1976 were being made by people; now we’re at the mercy of algorithms and foreign influence campaigns.
There are so many things to praise NETWORK for: its snappy dialogue (which won Paddy Chayefsky an Oscar), its incredible acting (which won Oscars for Finch, Faye Dunaway, and Beatrice Straight), its prescient vision of the future. But what stuck with me is how unvarnished it is in delivering its thesis: that just because someone is captivating when he talks, it doesn’t mean he deserves to be listened to.
